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Kategori: Minimalism

With the lifestyle that I currently live, I am basically only obligated to work 1.2 hours a day (5 days a week) to make ends meet. This does not include the help I potentially could get from investments.

Having to work fewer hours a day depends on two very basic components:

Fewer expenses

Making more money per hour

Getting to the point where you live with very few expenses is a process, and it has taken myself some time to get where I’m at. And I’m still not done yet. I still have student loans to pay off, and other monthly costs that can be brought down.

Luckily, I enjoy this whole process of requiring fewer and fewer resources to function, so it is all good.

The making more money per hour part may sound tough to some people, but it can actually be very simple.

Right now, I freelance as a personal trainer. A personal trainer is not expected to have clients from 9 to 5, and this is accounted for in the salary. The pay that I get is not the best in the world, but it is very far from the minimum wage in Denmark too.

Many other job functions are not expected to work non-stop for 8 hours a day. I could imagine that it’s the same for sports massage therapists, any other kind of therapist or maybe even dog walkers – I don’t know. I know that the class instructors at our gym get a pretty good salary too.

Finding some kind of job that isn’t expected to do full-time work can in many cases increase your hourly output by a lot.

Combine this with the idea of bringing your expenses down to an absolute minimum, and you are now forced to work very little every day.

I love that minimalism has won as much ground as it has these days. Questioning the whole buy-and-throw-out mentality, that is endemic to our society, can only be interpreted as something good.

However, most of the minimalists you see talking about the subject on the web, are neglecting a crucial part of the conversation. They love to talk about throwing out most of what they own, only to forget the fact that they’ll soon need to buy some stuff again because they just trashed a lot of useful items.

I have been through this whole cycle myself. Me and my wife went through a long period, where we threw out most of our stuff as a fun weekend-activity. Getting rid of stuff had a cleansing feeling to it. It was liberating, and I can understand how people get hooked on the whole throwing-stuff-out fascination.

While you are in the middle of getting rid of most of your possessions, you get the sense that there is real gold at the end of some rainbow – that throwing out stuff will actually make you happy.

…. and I’m sorry to announce: it obviously won’t.

It does feel liberating to have more space in your apartment, once you have less clutter in there, and it does give you a certain high to think about how little you need to thrive in everyday life. You’ll learn a lot about this.

But like many other things; the high you get is very temporary, and it won’t result in long-term happiness.

What does bring long-term happiness is an ever-increasing feeling of freedom – at least for me – and throwing out stuff won’t in and of itself result in freedom.

So if you really want to contradict the buy-and-throw paradigm; stop buying and stop throwing out things just for the sake of it.What really matters is paying attention to what you actually need to be happy, and what you can be perfectly satisfied without. Then you stop buying the things you don’t need, and then freedom begins 🙂

With the urbanization, gentrification and economic polarization of modern society, that the developed world is experiencing currently, it is getting increasingly normal to talk about “an elite” that supposedly controls everything and isolates itself from the rest of the common folk.

I don’t know if this phenomenon of an elite is anything particularly new in human history. However, it is clear that the wealth is now getting more concentrated in fewer rich people, and that the western middle-class is getting smaller.

You hear in the media that a lot of people is feeling disenfranchised due to this dynamic, and much of the successful election campaign of Donald Trump was build on this platform.

With this post, I am not going to make any political statement about the matter, but rather highlight how most people can feel like the come out on the winning side of this power struggle with a very simple strategy.

For more than a year now, I have promulgated the minimalist lifestyle as well as the concept of early retirement on this blog, and a funny side effect of this has been a change in my attitude towards the issue mentioned above.

I feel like a winner in the most widespread social battle of our time, and I am not even breaking a sweat in the meantime.

My solution

I lead a very simplistic lifestyle, spend my money only on the stuff that matters (which isn’t many things), work in a very low-stress position for a maximum of 30 hours a week, save most of my paycheck and invest it in stocks.

The last part is important.

People tend to forget, what actually happens when we buy stocks in a company: we become the owner – the ultimate CEO!

It is very easy to buy a stock, it requires almost nothing of you and anybody with half-a-decent salary is able to do it.

A guy working in Walmart can become the partial owner of Apple (not a stock recommendation) after a handful of paychecks, and suddenly Tim Cook is working for him!

I often think about how all of the phd’s and master degrees among my fellow citizens are stressing themselves out to give me a return on my investment. I’m not doing anything, I am just giving them 100 bucks, and let them figure out how to give me 105 or 110 back a year later.

They are sweating, I am not, and they are supposed to be the smartest people in the country ?

With a little frugality and minimalism, you too can become the true master of the corporate world in whatever country you live in, and take pleasure from the thought of how the most ambitious people are now working for you. If they are the elite, while working for you, I don’t know what that makes you!

“Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you‘re right.” ?

The essence of this is that our own attitude and perception of our capabilities plays a vital role in our odds of succeeding in anything. And I think it’s true.

Recently I have noticed many examples of people doubting their own capabilities/behavior in relation to their personal finances. They think they are irrational by nature and can’t be trusted with their own money.

Here are 3 examples of this:

In Denmark, we have a mandatory vacation fund, where employers are forced to take out a small portion of all employees paychecks, and pay it into this fund, so that employees can apply to have this money refunded to them, next time they can prove thatthey are going on vacation. Our government is basically saying: “you people aren’t responsible enough to be trusted with the long-term administration of your own money”. So they have decided to take them from us, however temporarily, pays us no interest in the meantime, and the worst part is that people are HAPPY about this arrangement. Even happy about the fact, that this isn’t a voluntary concept because they would not trust themselves to sign up for it, because they think of themselves as being economically irrational, and it is better to let Bigbrother handle their vacation money.

I was recently discussing the general concept of insurance with an otherwise really smart friend of mine. He told me how happy he had been about paying for the premium package with his insurance company because his policy had been triggered years earlier, which had meant a nice payday for him back then. After some quick calculations, though, we figured out that he had paid much more to his insurance company over the years, compared to the premium they had paid him on that particular day. He then said: “I know that I could have just saved all the money that I spent on insurance over the years, and been better off in the grand scheme of things, but nobody is able to act like that, so I am still happy with my decision”. (For the record, I am not against all insurance – topic for another day).

I also know a lot of people who feels like buying a home is more economically rational than renting because their housing loan serves as a mandatory savings account. I see how this can work, but buying a house in itself is not by default an effective way of saving up a lot of money – watch this video, to learn how renting can be just as smart IF you can manage to save and behave rationally!

I know that we are only humans, even myself :). And I don’t think that anyone has the capabilities to behave perfectly rational in all aspects of life.

However, I am a firm believer, that most people can behave mostly rational by cultivating the right automatic habits over time.

This is the type of journey I have been on for the past 2 years, ever since I dedicated myself to paying back those student loans, things have been going well, whereas I didn’t used to save anything for the future when I was younger.

The point is that we can all strive to become more rational and be smarter with our attitudes towards money. But it all has to begin with a belief in our own ability to become exactly that, and that we can make anything happen if we just change one small thing at a time – without forcing it or overloading ourselves with commitments. It has to come slowly.

It has now been almost exactly a year since I discovered the early retirement community on the internet when I was immediately hooked.

I found that early retirement was the next logical step to pursue, for a minimalist who seldomly has found a job that he truly enjoyed.

Early retirement is not something I aim for because I dream about laying on the couch all day. It is something I fantasize about because there are many things I want to do in life, that won’t necessarily earn me any money, and so I just need a lot of time.

If there is anything you want to accomplish in life, you must track your own progress, in order to stay on course and fully optimize for success.

So as you might have read about in an earlier post , I keep track of my overall progress in a spreadsheet, on how far I have come in my journey to financial independence.

The basic idea is that I calculate how much of monthly expenses can be covered by the passive income I generate, and so I can either cut back on expenses or generate more passive income to make progress on this goal.

Currently, I only have 2 passive sources of income:

I put aside money every month, and invest them in either stocks, mutual funds or index funds. The basic assumption in almost all early retirement plans is that you should be able to withdraw 4% of your total investment every year and still leave room for continual growth of your nest egg.

Income from this and other blogs, which is comprised of Google Adsense ads and Amazon affiliate links.

At the moment, the majority of my passive income stems from the investments, but as I see and up-trending tendency in my blog income, I hope this might not be the case within the next few years.

Getting to the point

So as you can see in the graph below, I have been able to generate enough passive income recently, that it corresponds to about 7% of my total expenses.

(The only setback that is visible in the graph, is explained by me cashing out some of my investments, in preparation for quitting my job in the fall of 2016)

This might not seem like a lot, but then again, this actually means that I am retired 2 days out of every month, which is a little uplifting to think about ?

Where do we go from here

It is important to understand, that I don’t actually take these 2 days off every month, and I don’t withdraw the 4% from the investments every year (yet), which means all of my passive income gets reinvested.

This way, I should see even faster and faster progress every month from here on out, which should result in a more exponentially shaped continuation of the graph above – especially if stock prices keeps going up.

One of my goals for 2017 is to make that graph reach 20% by December, and I will, of course, keep you updated on whether I reach this goal or not.

This first year of working on this goal has made me optimistic about the possibility of reaching retirement within 10 years (max) from when I began, which means I should be able to leave the rat race once I get to the age of 37. Let’s see 🙂

I must admit, I have always had problems with authoritiesto some degree throughout my life. Some might accuse me of having a big ego or being a spoiled child.

I know one thing, though: my parents had a very laissez-faire style of parenting me and my brother, and this has to be part of the explanation.

Because of this, I have always had problematic relationships with teachers in school, bosses at work and politicians that I don’t particularly agree with.

It is only natural for us humans, to mirror everyone around us in ourselves, and so I personally have a tendency to assume that everyone else must also hate their bosses, their workplace and restrictions on their lives in all forms – the same way I do.

So I sometimes wonder why people aren’t more weary of making grant commitments in their lives – to housing loans, car loans, pets they need to take care of for 15 years or even having kids. Don’t they see that all of this raises their dependency on others (as in their bosses)?.

Then again, I have to realize that not everyone is like me. Some people must actually like their boss and their bank.

Nevertheless, I still have to make the argument that many humans long for more freedom in modern society. And this, I think, make sense from an evolutionary perspective, because our psyche has not evolved yet, to being this dependent on external authoritative entities.

My Thesis

Every time we think about evolution, we can (simplistically speaking) forget about this most recent period, where we have had agriculturally based civilizations, and instead think primarily of the longer hunter-gatherer era we had before that.

Back then, we probably didn’t form groups much bigger than 150 people (according to Dunbar’s Number), and it is easy to imagine just how little authority one would encounter on a daily basis in those days.

Obviously, these societies would have some kind of chieftain among them, but rebellions could have quickly materialized once such an authority would get too unreasonable.

For the record, I am no anthropologistby any means, so what do I know? 🙂

My main point here, is that the level of authority that we have to deal with in modern society, is probably a little weird seen from our own biology, and maybe there is a good reason why so many dream about being their own bosses, financially free and influential enough to have a say in how the law system affects their lives.

Maybe, thinking this much about simplicity and freedom isn’t only for spoiled brats (like myself), but something that could enhance the lives of the majority?

It should be perfectly obvious, that a person who needs very little, has a higher than average chance of having “enough”.
Someone who lives his life in a manner, that indicates he can’t get enough, probably won’t.
This is simple, but the implications of this truth goes further in my view.

A person who dreams of doing creative painting as a profession, can only achieve this, by becoming sufficiently succesful as a painter, that it can provide him with enough (or more). The more he needs, the more succesful he has to get in order to stay in the game.

The simplistic lifestyle can therefore be considered an enabler of dreams.
Whatever you dream of doing with your life, can potentially be materialized by lowering the basic requirements of your lifestyle. It is my guess, that people who follows this advice has a higher rate of success in pursuing their true goals.

For me, cutting expenses, throwing out stuff and reprogramming my expectations of the future, was what helped me quit the job that I absolutely hated, and try something new. It made it a lot less scary.
I was fortunate enough, that I hadn’t let my needs rise in synchronicity with my income, and that allowed me to not get trapped, as I saw many of my former colleagues do.
Now, I am trying something else, and I love it – even though I don’t spend much money on luxury stuff; I don’t feel like it makes much of a difference on my long-term happiness.

If you are starting out from 0 (or in debt even), see how attainable you can make your ultimate goal, by lowering the bar for survival, before you begin putting in more work than necessary.

This is not about being unambitious. It is about ambitiously optimizing your chances of success – and learning about, what is truly valuable in life.

According to what I have observed, the average, modern minimalist/hipster type is a serious coffee snob.

You may, as an example, have seen The Minimalists promote the coffee house they co-own in Florida, or noticed how all minimalist community meetings are held in coffee houses that serves a top-of-the-line Americano.

But I actually think that this whole coffee fascination fits badly into the simple living ideology.
I get the feeling that many simplicity advocates, take all the money they save from living frugally and reallocates them into a new espresso machine, that can apply the perfect amount of pressure to the coffee-making process.

Thereafter comes the reoccurring extra expenses from supplying oneself with single-estate organic coffee from Kenya, that is so sour that only the supreme connoisseur can enjoy it.

This is not to say, that I am against coffee as a hobby. I just see it used as a tool for signaling that you are part of the group way too often.

And as with everything else, the danger of becoming a connoisseur is that you loose the ability to enjoy an average tasting/feeling/looking product. You loose the ability to see how privileged you are, when you drink an average cup of coffee, compared to what options people had available 100 years ago.

The author, Ryan Holiday, explains it so nicely when he says that he refuses to fly first class because he knows how that soon will be the new norm for him.

The bottom line is, I personally try not to get too heavily into the coffee universe, even though I love coffee. I have tried it, but I have also noticed how much self-deception and placebo effect is involved – just like with wine.

How I do

I have even experimented a lot with my own brewing techniques, and found that the way they do it on Bali is the best and simplest one.

The Balinese people simply grinds the beans into an extremely fine texture, put about 1.5 teaspoons of the grounds in a cup, dump boiling water on it and stir.

After a few minutes, the grounds falls to the bottom of the cup, and you are ready to drink – just make sure you stop drinking a little earlier than you normally would, to avoid eating the grounds.

There are 3 reasons why I love making coffee this way:

The coffee is unfiltered, which means you keep the precious coffee oils, that both taste good and have some cool effects on your health.

The method is very efficient, in terms how many beans it requires.

The coffee can be made without any equipment, which means you can make your coffee on the road, and you won’t have to buy any kind of machine for it.

This is, by my standards, the best way to drink coffee as a minimalist.

On this very blog of mine, I identify as being a minimalist/frugal person. Because of this fact, I always feel like I need to justify it, every time I advise the readers to break open their wallets.

In my opinion, the purpose of being a minimalist is not to spend no money whatsoever. The main idea is to realize, that most of what consumer culture has to offer, is total garbage, and that we should always be very skeptical, whenever someone is trying to sell us something.

However, in some cases, we simply run into products or offers, that are truly worth it, because they add value in a meaningful way to our lives. In those cases, I believe that it is exactly the job of the minimalist to shine some light on these objects, to make the market easier to navigate for everybody else.

As I said, it took me a long time to actually do it, since they were fairly expensive, but I always had the suspicion that they might be worth it. They are by no means, an essential product that everyone should own, but they are a really nice luxury to have if one can afford them.

Their main feature, obviously, is the noise-cancelling function. With them, you get a button, that you can press at any time, in case you want to shut out all low-level noise around you. This is truly powerful whenever you find yourself in a train, airplane or even open office, and want to be able to concentrate. I also find that you get a lot less fatigued from sitting on an airplane, when you are able to shut out the constant humming that goes on in the background during the entire trip. If you want to take a walk down the street and be alone with your thoughts in a noisy city, they are great for that too.

They do not make you completely deaf. They just filter out all low-level background noise, and still allow you to hear, what the person next to you is saying. This also makes them reasonably safe to wear in public/traffic.

I say that they are like having a new superpower, although a minor one, because they allow you to concentrate and have some peace, a little bit better than everyone around you – whenever you click the button.

They are great headphones in the classic sense too, and I use them for podcasts and music every day. However, the sound quality aspect is not something I obsess so much about. All I can say is that they are very good in my uninformed opinion.

To be honest, it is a minus that you have to charge the headphones separately every other day with a micro USB cable. But since you can do this, every time you sit in front of a laptop, it is a minor detail in my view.

When you ask the simple question of when the right time is to buy a new item – say shoes – the answer should be clear. It only seems logical to go out and spend money on new shoes, as soon as the old ones stop being functional. At the point where you cannot use them for their true purpose of walking/running, or at the point where people might take you for a hobo by the sight of them.

However, when do we ever get to this point in reality, before we replace them?

I know, in my case, I usually start paying attention to the decline of my shoes’ condition, around the time they are at the midpoint in their lifecycle. I begin noticing that something is slightly coming apart, or a color is getting a little altered from its original state.

At this point, I start “sticking out my antenna”. I check websites and catalogs for offers on shoes I might consider buying, and I begin to consider what brand of shoe I might want the next time.

A “need” for a new of pair shoes has been fully established inside me, even though I am still far from being “in need” of a new pair of shoes.

Then a few days later, when I walk into to a shopping mall or check out a website, I find the exact kind of shoe, or the exact kind of offer I was looking for, and it seems illogical not to take advantage of it on the spot, now that I have found what I was hoping for.

What my monkey brain doesn’t realize is the insignificance of this lucky coincidence, since a shopping mall usually is filled with hundreds of thousands of shoes, and they are almost all on sale during any given three month period.

When I decide to take advantage of this “phenomenal” offer, I feel like I have made a rational business decision, and it therefore only seems reasonable to throw out the old pair – especially now that I have gotten the new ones at such a good price. I have replaced my old shoes, close to twice as fast as I needed to, and I am still way too happy about it.

What I should have done instead, was ask myself beforehand: when am I really going to need a new pair of shoes? When will the old pair no longer be able to serve its purpose?

And then act accordingly, not eagerly.

Or, at least, I should have kept the old ones, until they were truly useless, and only taken the new ones into use then.

I think most of us end up spending much more than we need, due to this dynamic, and it certainly doesn’t only apply to shoes. Because of it, we never get to experience the feeling of actually needing anything. For some reason, I feel like it would be good for us, to experience that feeling from time to time.

It’s worth saying, that this mindset might not apply exactly to groceries and other consumables.